Those of us deep into promoting environmental sustainability and spotlighting solutions for drawing down greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere are now swept up along with everyone in the deadly emergency of a stealthy disease. For 50 years, we've been witnessing more and more lives disrupted by forces of nature increasingly whipped up by the heat of global warming.   Now, we are staying at home, working and socializing online.   Venturing outdoors, we witness the glory of nature’s springtime exuberance bursting forth in traffic-free stillness. The beauty of nature reminds us why we celebrate Earth Day in April. So, how do we make the most of this mandated pause in our "work hard/drive fast/play date" lifestyle to breathe into this stay-at-home time and emerge with skills and habits more in line with living in a sustainable society?  A new strategy:  READ, PLANT, EAT.

READ

Two engaging memoir-style books and one accessible academic study take a historical perspective on today’s U.S. lifestyles. They each draw conclusions about how Americans’ individual choices, en masse, over time, led to grave social and environmental deterioration on land and sea and sky around the world. Scientist Hope Jahren’s The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change, and Where to Go from Here, explains itself in the title.   We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, is by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close".  These authors promote the importance of individual choice and initiative, a theme that hearkens back to Princeton professor Melissa Lane’s 2012 book, Eco-Republic, an insight-filled interpretation of Plato’s Republic as a model for effective social change.  These three books are mutually complementary in providing motivation for self-reflection, and data-driven arguments for personal initiatives to examine and modify our lifestyle choices (what we eat, how we travel, how we landscape, our financial investments) in order to halt and reverse global warming, to more equitably share the products of industrial production and the bounty of Earth’s life-sustaining ecosystems.

Though many people and their governments acknowledge that human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests are disrupting Earth’s life support systems, these activities continue to accelerate.  Pollution by greenhouse gases continues to increase.  All three authors bring up the fact that regardless of how deeply we realize that Earth’s ecosystem is being destroyed by human activity, almost all of us are still continuing to warm the atmosphere through billions of daily choices.  These authors write to inspire readers to courageously step out of the mainstream and develop new habits to bring about the essential goal of “sustainability” - a social ethos that enables us as well as future generations to thrive.  

Lane cites the charity, Forum for the Future, which defines sustainable development as  “a dynamic process which enables all people to realize their potential and improve their quality of life in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the earth’s life support systems (Lane, p. 20). Lane connects this with Plato’s idea of “the good” as an evolving aim of a healthy and viable society.

Sustainability is not about maintaining the status quo ad infinitum into the future. It is about reconfiguring society within the limits of the earth, so that over time, society will be ever more able to realize and instantiate the good (p.20). 

All three authors present myriad examples of unhealthy environmental consequences of individual purchasing choices for which the actual costs of environmental damage are excluded and 'externalized'.   Jahren explains.

The average weight of American automobiles rose sharply as families put minivans and SUVs and pickup trucks into daily commuter use.  By 2000 the highways were filled with vehicles as heavy as the Lincoln Continentals and Ford Gran Turinos of the seventies, and at 23 mpg, average fuel efficiency was actually lower than it had been 20 years earlier. 

It didn’t stop. Americans bought still more cars and kept driving them, and today they travel twice as far by car each year as they did in 1970  (pp 98-99).

We added extra lanes to highways, and extra stress to our commutes. And it’s not just cars. Consider the enormous greenhouse gas emissions from flying.

The average American car gets about 30 mpg, the average airplane gets something like 400 FEET to the gallon… If instead of flying, all 200 passengers escaped from the plane into 200 separate cars, and drove, individually, from Newark to Minneapolis, we would have collectively burned 40% less fuel than we ended up using for that one plane by flying all together.

And travelling by train would use only half as much fuel as driving separately.  Jahren found hi-speed rail is the only option that can successfully compete with air travel, but travelers tend to choose flying when the extra time needed for land travel exceeds 30 minutes (p. 92).

Technology offers a new option:

when SKYPE first became available in 2003 the business world announced the near term obsolescence of face-to-face meetings. However, today Americans take almost 2 million more flights per year than they did in 2003, and the majority of those flights are for business  (Jahren, pp 90-91).

More people are traveling, and they prefer to fly. Public policy tends to measure happiness as “preferences,” but ask these passengers if flying actually makes them happy.  Plato considers health to be the basis for happiness, in contrast to today’s metrics based on consumer choice. But today’s practices are changing as other more complex metrics such as “flourishing” are gaining acceptance.    

Psychologists are beginning to stress the difference between transitory satisfactions and life-satisfaction over time; economists are asking whether economies built around consumption, which inherently promote frustration and inequality, should be reassessed against a more complex standard of the social good (Lane, p. 103).

Lane concludes that Plato recognizes a mutual dynamism, for better or worse, between a just and well-ordered republic and the agency of its citizens.

This Platonic understanding of ourselves as co-producers of our characters and culture can today underwrite an understanding of ourselves as eco-producers. We produce sustainability through the terms in which we interact, wherever we interact, or we produce its opposite. As eco-producers, we understand ourselves to be non-negligible, and to be responsible, in producing and reproducing the conditions for our own sustainable individual and social health (Lane, p. 126).  

PLANT

The circle of life makes Earth unique; it gave rise to us and sustains us and our civilization.  Jahren’s explanation is a marvel of refined simplicity and absolute relevance to understanding the intimate role that carbon dioxide plays in our energy systems, and the warming effects of its increased concentrations in our air. 

Plants get energy from the sun in the form of light and they get carbon from the air in the form of a gas called carbon dioxide. When we burn food in our bodies, we use the energy to live and we exhale carbon dioxide out of our lungs. Thus, the history of life is a great... two-step: energy and carbon dioxide in [plants], energy and carbon dioxide out [animals].

When we burn fossil fuels – that is, long dead plants – inside our car engines, energy harvested from the sun millions of years ago runs the engine, and carbon dioxide sequestered millions of years ago is released into the air (Jahren, pp. 128-129).

Plants growing in natural ecosystems provide room and board for animals big and small. Deforestation, desertification, urbanization, sea water rise, all the result of human activities, not only inhibit the uptake of carbon dioxide, but also force wildlife to crowd into smaller and less suitable areas.  Planting native species of trees, shrubs, and flowers in public and private land not only soaks up carbon dioxide and provides habitat for wildlife, it can add interest and natural beauty close to home.

Here are steps we all can take now, as we plan for new habits to take hold when re-emerging from 'distancing'; 

·       Plant herbs in a sunny window to boost the availability of healthy greens and make food more interesting.

·       Plan a home garden and start seeds for vegetables once it gets a little warmer outside.

·       Plan an edible landscape, even if you’re mostly feeding wildlife.  

·       Contact the town and request that a street tree be planted near your home or apartment.

It’s exciting to think about landscaping, but it may take courage to dig up a lawn to make a garden.  Consider the potential encouragement to others.

The possibility of serving as an exemplar for others, of reorienting one’s roles and organizations to some extent, and of contributing to change the ideological and political climate so as to make further political action possible, is a possibility without inherent limits on success. … The only certainty is that doing nothing to change the course of business as usual is a mistake....

As the eighteenth-century statesman Edmund Burke is reported to have said, ‘No man can make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.’ (Lane p. 182).

EAT

Humans, like all animal species, require food to fuel our actions.  The food we eat becomes fuel that's converted into energy. But Foer points out that we've over-produced and over-consumed to such an extreme that Earth has become “an animal farm.”  Consider these statistics:

·       There are 23 billion chickens living on Earth at any given time. Their combined mass is greater than that of all other birds on the planet.

·       Globally, humans use 59% of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock.

·       On average, Americans consume twice the recommended intake of protein.

Jahren points out the huge inequities among the 7 billion of us living on our planet.

The enormous consumption of food and fuel by just 10% of us is actively threatening Earth’s ability to produce the basics of life for the other 90%. Most political discussions of climate change are predicated on the hope that this may be reversible; the truth is that it may not (pp 13-14).

We got ourselves into this predicament through choices we've made without fully understanding the consequences.  Foer proposes that we refrain from meat and dairy during breakfast and lunch, a practice that would have a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gases.  He reminds us that, “Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon, and can participate in the reversal of climate change” and global warming.

Foer explains why this is a worthy initiative. Here is a small sample of his reasons.

·       Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation.

·       We do not know for sure if animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change, or the leading cause.

·       We do know for sure that we cannot address climate change without addressing animal agriculture.

·       People who eat diets high in animal protein are 4 times as likely to die of cancer as those who eat diets low in animal protein are. Smokers are only 3 times as likely to die of cancer as non-smokers are.

Jahren suggests a mantra, Use Less and Share More, pointing out that it is both equitable and efficient when practiced in the US. We should acknowledge that we have contributed the most to the problem, and because of our outsized consumption, changes that we make will have the greatest impact.

Can you develop a menu that is entirely plant-based for half of your meals? 

·       Most beans, right out of the package, will sprout when awakened by soaking them in water.

·       There are many commercial varieties of plant-based burgers.

·       Microgreens are versatile and flavorful. You can also grow them in a sunny window.

·       Nuts, fruits, root vegetables, lentils, beans, rice, can be combined to create meatless, high protein meals.

Jahren recognizes that courage is needed to have a realistic hope for mitigating climate change.

We must go forward and live within the world that we have made, while understanding that its current state arises form a relentless Story of More. … It is precisely because no single solution will save us that everything we do matters. Every meal we eat, every mile we travel, and every dollar we spend presents us with a choice … You have the power. How will you use it (pp 172-3)? 

We need the courage to act according to our values within the world that is given to us today, including a culture in which material growth continues to play a destructive role.  Self-reflection can create the courage to choose a road less travelled, that may take us in the direction of Use less, share more, and culminate in a more equitable livelihood among our 7 billion global co-inhabitants. 

While technical solutions like renewable energy and intergovernmental initiatives like the Paris Accord are also needed to slow, stop, and eventually reverse global warming,  these three authors challenge us to think beyond the top-down solutions to imagine and then work toward personal change, to adopt a social ethos that prioritizes a sustainable livelihood for the good of all 7 billion of us.

In addition to self-reflection, accurate scientific knowledge and new skills and habits are also required. This virus-induced pause in our routines offers a time to learn new facts and practice new behaviors to propel a quest for right livelihood.

Marian Glenn is Professor Emerita of Biology at Seton Hall University.  Her home in Summit, New Jersey is heated and cooled with a geothermal heat exchange system powered by solar energy from the roof. She replaced much of her lawn with a native plant garden that hosts a hive of honey bees .